Abstract

This study of Benjamin's philosophy of language moves away from the strictly theoretical toward a literary application of Benjamin's ideas on language. Although a theoretical framework must be established as a starting point, the implications of Benjamin's language philosophy can be most productively developed within the context of literary criticism. ;Chapter One examines Benjamin's dramatic notion of the origin of language as the "tragic" separation of the body and the word. Their agonistic polarization is traced from the pre-tragic sacrificial ritual to tragedy, which simultaneously marks the transference of sacrifice from the physical to the metaphysical plane.Trauerspiel, in Benjamin's view, offers the possibility of reconciliation by returning langauge to a material plane. The language of Trauerspiel echoes mimetically the physical and historical deterioration of nature, a world of ruins and hollowed-out objects which are as denatured as the language of man. The task of allegory is to free words from the strictures of a false alignment by juxtaposing them in a manner which allows them to draw new meanings from each other. Meaning, for Benjamin, is constituted through the cross-illuminating force of proximity and contiguity, not through symbolization, which presumes a Platonic separation of things and ideas. ;Chapter Two analyzes Benjamin's theory of mimesis as a theory of perception and reading. With the introduction of spoken and written language, the subject increasingly loses the ability to recognize inner correspondences contained within natural signs. In the course of this decline, the subject relies on the material sign for the presentation of sensuous similarities which increasingly obscures his perception of non- and extra-sensuous similarities. ;Chapters Three and Four develop a literary application of the ideas isolated in the beginning chapters. Starting from Benjamin's statement that Kafka's work continues the linguistic project which Hofmannsthal left unfinished, texts by Hofmannsthal and Kafka are interpreted as a restitution of the mimetic and the material. Benjamin's ideas on language are articulated indirectly here, as in his own work, through the process of literary criticism